Menu

Art Book: A Vintage Design

Its been quite some time since my last art journal. In fact, its been some time since my last post. The long break was since I was completely out of it, unable to come up with good ideas, all I could do was wait till I could create something good!

Now this journal – I had actually made it quite some time ago. But I wasn’t in the mood to write this post then 😛 So, posting this now… 🙂

My most used product when doing an art journal is Gesso. I simply start by applying it on the complete surface, sometimes creating a texture out of it, which gives me a good base to start with.

But this time, I didn’t 😉

I started out by using Gesso for stencilling parts of the stencil in 3 different areas of the sheet, forming a triangle of sorts. After this, I sponged some distress ink, concentrating darker colors at the stencilled areas. Once this dried a bit, I used a wet piece of cloth to wipe out the color from the stencilled Gesso.

I also applied some drops of water on top to get a splotched effect.

Once completely dry, I felt that the areas in between were much lacking interest and added a lot of white space to the journal. I took out one of my embossing folders, and used it two ways – One, I placed the paper in between and used a brayer to create partial embossing in a couple of places in the journal. After this, I gently brushed some dark ink on top to highlight the embossed area. (This is visible in the topmost image, at the top and bottom right corners) Two, I applied ink directly on top of the embossing folder and used it like a stamp to add the pattern on the journal.

Next, I used the same stencil, placed it next to the originally stencilled areas and applied some black ink there. This generated a kind-of shadow effect for the original stencilled areas.

After this, I kinda felt that the Gesso was not white enough – maybe because of all the inking, but it had turned creamish by then! 😉 I replaced the stencil in the gessoed areas and applied some silver ink on top. This highlighted the stencilled area beautifully and also gave a good contrast and shine to the project.

I finally added some rhinestones, depicting rain/flowers here and there. And added multi-color flower shaped sequins to the center of the stencilled flowers.

It took a lot of time, but I was really happy with the finished piece! 🙂